Consumer Community Improvement Methods

A continuous improvement framework and then accepted and practiced methods are important to the collaborative consumer community due to the nature of the community and they are also extremely difficult to maintain, again, due to the nature of the community.  This is why it is important to implement both the program management framework to maintain direction and oversight in addition to the integration into your extended partner network.  You will never be able to maintain the long term success and value to both the consumer and your organization without a program management framework that supports a robust continuous improvement program.

Due to the nature of the consumer community and especially because the consumer members are under no obligation to participate in the management and improvements to the community the program management framework can be especially difficult to implement.  Consumer participation can and will be a very fickle and inconsistent act that requires regular and creative encouragement.  The act of encouraging consumer participation then will be a full time activity within the program management framework and the methods to maintain the participation must constantly be reviewed and refreshed to ensure a continued participation.  The most important requirement to remember is that the consumer must be excited and provided with a continuous stream of new and renewed content and methods for participation in order to maintain that participation.

The program management framework must support and encourage this constant stream of methods in the continuous improvement process as part of its strategic framework.  You must implement a method that encourages and captures the consumer feedback into a data store that will support the analysis of the response to improve the community and then to also identify potential new community offerings.  This analysis must also include two additional aspects; your extended network partners and also the changing cloud technologies and services.  At the very core of this community is a very fluid basis of requirements and new opportunities that must be supported in a method that is in turn very fluid.

This fluid method of support requires a guiding framework to encourage structured and standard methods of analysis and process improvements that will allow the community to incorporate changes in a positive manner.  The definition of fluid in the consumer community is a continuous level of discontinuous change and the best method to support discontinuous change is the combined program management framework and robust continuous improvement process.  The key challenge to the long term success of the community is the focus on continuous, this must be supported by a method that frequently assesses the internal and external signals from consumers and the industry to improve the community and encourage renewed participation of all members.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?